You score in basketball if the opposing team puts the ball in their own basket.

make the 3 worth 2.5 points to reduce the focus on it. the game is ****ing boring these days and it's only gonna get more so when teams are jacking up 50 3s a game

This right here is easily the best post itt.



I award thee +100K SE Forum Points!

Really terrible idea to stop play constantly bfor video review. No reason to think decisions will be any better.

Foul calls fall into - obvious, fuzzy, and wrong. For fuzzy all you can do is randomize and call some fixed percentage of them. For wrong you can use video review or employ referees that aren't on the take.

If you want to reduce it's two obvious routes:

1. Allow more contact. Hoops was more fun to watch in the Barkley Oakley era.
2. Make fts worth more. Now no one will foul it will be a 3pt contest even more boring than now.

This is correct. 3pts killed the game.

He suggested the exact opposite. The game wouldn't stop while the review center works in the background.

You hear that a lot from "purists" but market research from the league disagrees. Same as with the NFL where some people wish teams would again be allowed to play defense and hit the quarterback.

Most viewers prefer to see a 132-129 score over a 89-86. Especially in the regular season.

With today's knowledge it's crazy to think after 15 years of use, the NBA had to move the 3 point to encourage more players to shoot them. Even 20 years ago you still saw a lot of 2 point shots from spots where nobody would shoot from today unless time is running out. Having that "dead zone" inside the 3 point line is obviously pretty bad for the game.

A running tally of fts and then reckoning at the end of the quarter or whatever is even dumber. Game play matters little. Got to store up fts ....

If you ask people if they prefer 120 to 90 pts they say 120. If you ask them if they prefer competitive exciting hoops to fill well spaced hoops they say the former.

NBA ratings are falling and falling so maybe all that marketing polling isnt going so well.

Pretty sure the league is happy about averaging 1% less viewers per game over the regular season compared to last year.

On one hand 1.59mil viewers per game is the second lowest number ever, on par with those terrible years in the early 2000s but OTOH prime time TV viewership numbers are 40% less than what they were back then.

The NBA loses viewers because their core demographic doesn't watch linear TV anymore. MLB loses viewers because their core demographic dies. Not sure if one of the two is preferable for the league. I guess MLB could argue that their numbers would be better if life expectancy in the US wasn't so low compared to other industrialized countries?

The frequent stoppages in play certainly don't help the NBA product though.

I don't understand why someone would want to watch:
-flopping;
-Hack-a-Shaq;
- impossible-to-fairly-enforce FT rebounding violations;
-guys take 15 seconds to shoot a 15 ft 1 point shot with no defender;
-coaches' challenges which stop the game (instead of procedural review of all calls while the game continues).

The trend in major sports is to speed up games, not slow them down. I understand NBA is a fast paced game, so there would need to be some accommodation as FT breaks would be no more. So instead of ~4 minutes per quarter of FT shooting, add 2 minutes per quarter of commercial time. Revenues go up with the increased ad time, and game time is shortened ~8 minutes. Simply give each coach an extra timeout per quarter.

But more people watched it. Now it's just dull. All skills and spacing.

Now they would foul Shaq constantly. Never let him get a shot off. Clearly +EV. Would be even duller.

If you want to reduce scoring and make defense easier, there are plenty of ways to do it without returning to the era of Charles Oakley and Anthony Mason. Those teams were horrible to watch unless you were a Knicks fan.

Not if you have a 90%+ FT shooter converting all those fouls. You'd basically lose by 25+ every time. And you wouldn't have to wait 10 minutes watching somebody hit 19 out of 20 FTs due to Haq-a-Shaq.

Watching NBA playoffs the last few years, game seems as good as ever. At least in the playoffs. Don't see anything needing fixing.

Now the load managing and meaninglessness of the regular season, that could use some fixing.

To some extent I agree, but increasing revenue, improving ratings, and getting rid of flopping need to be addressed at some point.

Keeping ratings steady is a huge win for the NBA.

Basketball and soccer have the youngest audiences among major team sports. Last time I checked the average NBA fan was in their late 30s, compared to late 40s for NFL and mid 50s for baseball. Older gen Z is getting close to 30 now and 1/3 of them don't watch live sports at all.

A pretty easy fix to have less stoppages would be to decrease the number of fouls per player. You could change the rule from 5 to 3 with players getting a 4th after 30mins of playing time and a 5th after 40 minutes. The major downside to that would be superstars fouling out more frequently though.

That adds another level of strategy that I'm not sure a lot of fans/players/coaches would be interested in. It does increase rest time for aggressive players, which could be a plus I guess.

To me it boils down to why foul shots exist: to deter fouling. There are better ways now to deter fouling. All the other stuff are additional benefits that to me make it a win-win for a lot of interested parties.

In hockey they have or had back when I watched, a penalty for what they calling diving. Same thing as flopping. In other words, you get called for a personal foul if you flop. Seems like a simple solution the NBA could use.

I think a lot of sports would benefit from games being shortened. More excitement and action, less garbage time. People have more possible ways to entertain themselves today then ever before, the standard length of sporting events could probably benefit from being shortened. What percentage of sports viewers actually watch games from beginning to end? I probably do this for about 5 games per year on average, across all sports. Then another 20-30 games a year I'll watch most of.

4 quarters that are only 8 minutes long would probably lead to a better product.

IIRC NBA was tossing around the idea of 10 minute quarters several years ago. IDK if this is the reason why summer league has 10 minute quarters, but I'm all for it.

-less fatigue in players => fewer injuries;
-condensed action;
-some allowance for more ad time to compensate for shorter game time window;
-greater flexibility in scheduling double headers for TV;
-less reason for load management.

Regular season would greatly benefit. And they already have best of 7 for every playoff series, so I don't see a big difference IRT luck over skill.

Imo a lot of the FIBA rules are superior to NBA rules, including 10 minute quarters and shot clock reset to 14 seconds after offensive rebounds. Also that they don't have an imaginary cylinder over the rim and enforce the traveling rule.

Reducing game time is the best thing that happened to MLB in ages. Might help the NBA, too.

Shot clock resets to 14 in the nba btw.

So what stops a super tall guy from standing under the basket and just swatting everything away?

Just couldn't disagree more with this. The previous NBA was largely omg we have a 7 foot guy with just a little bit of skill. His skillset would be terrible if he was 6'6", but he's 7 feet and we can throw it inside to him and hope for the best. And he can defend the interior. So let's draft Big Country Reeves in the first round instead of hometown boy Steve Nash or other far more skilled athletes. It was a game where Michael Jordan was a #3 pick because two guys who were 7' tall were good too. Basketball was largely a game dominated by really tall guys, whereas today it's dominated by really skilled guys (being tall still helps obviously)

IIRC only after the ball touches the rim then it's fair game, i.e. interference is allowed.

Grunch from this point but this is not very astute Pokerhero.

So you're saying you just clarify scores every quarter and all of a sudden the score changes drastically depending on the circumstances. That's why you resume the last 5 min. But I guess a team can go up 15 points but if there were foul shots the game would actually be tied. I feel it would kill the excitement as you're thinking "I know they're up 15 but they have 12 FTs at the end of quarter so they might catch up!"

I guess it could potentially add more excitement to free-throws than the game itself. Forget about a 4 point play where a low scoring player who shoots 75% would lose his extra point.

Steph would average 50 points a game this way. Free throw shooting can decide games holmes, better practice them.